Who is a Whistleblower?
 

For Arendt, the “basic issue raised by the papers is deception.” Ellsberg’s whistleblowing revealed the incredible and unconstitutional deception that had overtaken the highest levels of the United States’ government in its speaking about and understanding of the Vietnam War. Since lying is endemic to politics, whistleblowing is essential to democratic states. When lying becomes so ingrained and deceptive, it must be revealed. And that is also why it is important to understand who is, and who is not, a whistleblower.  

The recent arrest of Julian Assange has led some, like Edward Wasserman, to argue that Assange deserves protection as a whistleblower. But Allison Stanger offers a careful definition of whistleblowing and reads the Mueller Report to argue that Julian Assange is not a whistleblower; nor is he a journalist.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is neither whistleblower nor journalist. He is an Australian citizen charged by the Justice Department with conspiring to hack into a U.S. government computer.

The report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III released this past Friday amply documents that Assange, with the support of Russian intelligence, played a critical role in the 2016 presidential election. He is a potential missing link in the chain of understanding the extent to which foreign intervention affected the American electoral process.

This is not a partisan issue. Democrats certainly would have agreed with Mike Pompeo, speaking in 2017 as CIA director before becoming secretary of state last year, when he said, “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

The special counsel’s investigation had long ago established that WikiLeaks distributed materials obtained from Russian military intelligence’s hack of the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the private email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. Now the Mueller report has refocused attention on the degree of contact during the campaign between WikiLeaks and Trump associates.

WikiLeaks launched in 2006. In the years that followed, Assange released classified information about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was hailed as a whistleblower. But his actions over time indicate that he is not. To have a meaningful national conversation on whistleblowing, we must deploy a nonpartisan definition: A whistleblower is an insider who has evidence of misconduct (illegal or improper conduct) and exposes it, either to the authorities or to the news media. In government, misconduct is illegality or a violation of constitutional norms.

By this definition, former U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg blew the whistle on the United States’ dishonest conduct regarding the Vietnam War. He was a whistleblower in a way that Assange could never be, because Assange is a foreign national who reportedly collaborated with Russian intelligence to derail Clinton’s candidacy. As unredacted portions of the Mueller report show, during the 2016 presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks communicated both with Trump advisers and with Russian-intelligence (GRU) front organizations, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. WikiLeaks subsequently sought to cover up its connections with the GRU. The pattern of redacted passages suggests that investigators continue to look into the link between WikiLeaks’ election sabotage and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.